Pages

Tuesday, 21 October 2014

In May this year I worked on a new series of prints, Storms in a Teacup, a metaphor for how friends come together over a cup of tea (or coffee) and ‘put the world to rights’ whether that means supporting each other through the trials and tribulations of life, or just for a good gossip!

This has developed into pushing some ideas around for a concertina book, in which I've decided to use having a cup of tea as my subject matter, employing it again as a metaphor for social relationships. Objects already invested with meaning used to symbolise friendship, memory, ritual, intimacy and shared identities, and with this I hoped to show the narratives of family and social relationships.

But it's taken me most of the summer to decide on a text, in fact I wasn't really getting anywhere and had rather forgotten my original point (as the text in these images shows) and it had languished on a shelf in the studio for some weeks.

However, a comment by a friend staying with us lodged in my brain, "a cup of tea?" and I found myself using it today when working on a poem for a new series of workshops at BlueGate Poets, starting this coming weekend with Carrie Etter.

And I realised, this is kind of what I want for this project. A simple, pared down narrative.